Drifting toward a better Sim
David Berg:
I think you just answered my question about what triggers "spotlight" moments. It's the way you go about providing character-centric bits.
As far as giving the PCs meaningful choices, imagine if they could do the following:
1) stop the battle from happening, or make it short and decisive, or turn it into a bloodbath that doesn't end until one side is eliminated
2) convince Kenlei's dad to betray the chamberlain, or convince the chamberlain to betray the emperor
and imagine some meaningful consequences of these decisions:
Fire spirit scars Tusk for life for disobedience, Kenlei's dad becomes corrupt vs. Tusk's race wiped out, Kenlei's dad killed.
Maybe these examples are unfeasible for your game, but my point is that they are proactive, directing the flow of in-game events, rather than reactive, taking your decided events and processing them.
I'd also make sure that outcomes that matter to one player are correlated withoutcomes that matter to the other (i.e. if Tusk's race is saved, Kenlei's dad dies - players opposed; or, if Tusk's race is saved, Kenlei's dad lives - players united). Without this correlation, you get spotlights.
David Berg:
Er, when I said "the other", I meant "the others." Forgot about poor George entirely. I hope you give him a reason to be invested in the larger events; dealing with some injured chick in battle sounds like a nice bonus, not a reason to play the session.
John Adams:
Real life is a bitch. So George couldn't make it at all and Paul was an hour late and we got about 1/2 of what we wanted done. That's the reality of Actual Play as you get older, kids.
Update: Blackbane and his lieutenants are dead by Tusk's hand, the center of Blackbane's line is broken but the battle's outcome is still uncertain. I introduced the potential slave girl, for the moment she's unconscious and forgotten on the battlefield.
Combat was OK but on the slow side. It's a pretty crunchy system with high Points of Contact to put out a small bit of fiction. We made it more than a simple hack-n-slash and injected some tactics and some interesting story elements like Kenlei's overall confusion over what the heck was happening.
I gave Mark the buffed numbers for Tusk + Fire Spirit but let him narrate the effects so he became a ten foot tall pillar of fire stalking through the enemy lines. Player Creativity = More Fun.
Paul/Endymion magically possessed Blackbane's top LT and loudly exclaimed "Enough! You are no longer my Lord!" as he started attacking Blackbane's other defenders. This had a devastating effect on the morale of everyone in earshot. Player Creativity = Fun ++
Melee itself is highly structured, but the "good stuff" above, the meaning of the combat is entirely free-form. Maybe that's fine, but I feel it's lacking a formal structure.
David: We're basically on the same page about "what", but it's the "how" that I'm looking for. Surely, George needs a better reason to show up than to play 1 short, possibly disconnected scene. The plot definitely needs to weave the PCs together, and the fundamental problem is that this wasn't setup from the beginning. The answer to all of this is simply to "fix it" as opportunities allow without exerting GM force, creating new PCs or dumping whole story lines.
I like your examples of meaningful choices and the Phase C stuff, but I infer you mean I should set all this up during prep and that's not going to produce the kind of opportunity I'm talking about. Choices need to arise spontaneously during play. I don't really want the onus entirely on me, either. I'm not going to see every opportunity, and what I think is a meaningful choice (especially on the fly during play) may not grab the players the way I want it to. I need the player to see a choice that grabs him and have the power to go for it. I also need to retrain my players who still expect me to drive the entire story.
I think my "spotlight" is a red herring. The fundamental question is do all of the players care about this Situation? If not, how do we make that happen?
I think the "how" that I'm missing is a functional conflict resolution system which focuses and empowers the players. I look at the engine that drives a game like Capes or DitV and I say "hell yeah!". The trick is working within existing mechanics and supporting Sim rather than Nar.
Ideal Features:
1. several iterations of the technique must be applied to resolve a conflict
2. each iteration adds cool stuff to the fiction
3. each iteration builds interest and intensity
4. a great final payoff
This is a tough nut to crack. I have some ideas but I need to play them to see how they work. Vincent's ideas on resolution are a good start.
Ron Edwards:
Hi John,
I think you're coming to some strong conclusions, and I agree with you that spotlight is not the issue. I'm working up an extensive reply and wanted to let you know.
Back soon, Ron
Ron Edwards:
Overall, I think there’s not much to tell you. I’m actually a little bit hesitant to interfere with the obviously successful process you’re undergoing under your own direction. Even before posting, you and the others have passed two major milestones already: the time thing and the money thing. This is where you guys finally admitted that Gary Gygax’s in-bold, in-caps advice in the D&D rulebook (see my Simulationism essay) was and is complete ass. So far so good.
The group seems to be right on track with you regarding all of these issues. I see a real success story brewing, and that’s exciting.
I think it’s especially valuable that you are willing to work in steps and are not demanding full insight, full techniques, full solutions, and perfect results to be handed to you in some kind of perfect instruction manual.
I’ll isolate a couple of quibble-type points or sentences that kicked off responses for me, and then I’ll try to summarize what I think your next steps or concepts might be.
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* The PC's aren't moving around inside MY story, the story should be about the PCs
I’ll re-word this in a couple of different ways.
1. “There is no ‘the’ story. We won’t have a story until after we play together and the characters have made decisions right there in the developing fiction.”
2. “My job is to provide pregnant situations, interesting characers, and problems for which I do not have an answer in mind.”
3. “The players can be prompted into action of some kind, but not cued to deliver actions of particular kinds.”
Usually, I talk about these techniques in the context of Narrativist play, but you’re right, they aren’t restricted to that mode (although necessary to it).
The new kind of Sim
You’re absolutely right that this isn’t about finding magic mechanics. In terms of my Big Model, you are talking about fundamentals of the SIS, not about details of Techniques within System.
It might help to lay out some my thoughts about this thing. More and more, I’m coming to realize that a key portion of functional Simulationist play is to recognize what non-gaming information or material is going to be held up as valuable during play.
It could be a genre (“westerns! with magic!”), in which case, the problem is being too general. “Westerns” is actually pretty vague and various; one might consider, for instance, the role of Native Americans as critical content whose presentation causes westerns to differ greatly. “Science fiction,” “superheroes,” “horror,” all have the same problem, so my point is to narrow it down with specific examples. If I say “westerns like The Wild Bunch and magic like Hellblazer,” that’s pretty damned different from “westerns like Stagecoach and magic like Bewitched.”
It could be a value system, a subculture or style of some kind. In which case, the problem is flash over substance, basically verbal dress-up with nothing happening. Unless there’s some kind of social context with added value of its own (e.g. getting laid at clubs and LARPs), the activity founders. It’s worth considering what sort of problems and hassles the characters are expected to be dealing with (either pushed at them or generated by them), and that everyone understands that as an obligation
I can go through any number of other bases for Sim play (physics, fantasy-physics, probably being the next obvious one; some kind of scaleable physical modeling), but I think you probably get the idea. Get one’s head, and the shared group-head, out of role-playing, and into considering something that everyone recognizes and values. Then that’s the creative standard – and later, a procedural standard – that serves for the celebratory content, even if it’s radically tweaked.
Illusionism
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Look out for GM Force. Just don't do it. If you slip up, cop to it immediately and give the players their due. Specifically, tell the players everything that might be relevant to the current situation, even if their characters are clueless. Let the dice decide if the PC's discover the secret, but stop trying to surprise the players.
Indeedy-do … or is it? I agree with you about the Force itself, but I also think that we should go over some of the things which are done in its absence. Let me pull out a couple of things from there.
1. About surprise, I suggest letting the players be surprised on their own time using information that’s available to them, primarily through observation. If it happens before the characters are surprised, fine; if it doesn’t, also fine.
2. I strongly, strongly suggest considering what information you know they must have, surprising or not, in order to play after a given point. In that case, remove all Fortune from the process of acquiring that information. Fortune, by definition, means that something might not happen. Trying to link “they must know” with “conversation skill roll” or “perception roll” is a quagmire in which entire groups become mired for years.
Overall, the real insight or point about this whole Force thing is easy (although scary): that the GM is not the font of the creative experience. This is not film, in which the director and other creative people present the film to the audience; it isn’t literature or painting or comics or any other art form or medium. Everyone is a contributor to the SIS (“shared”), and so that means everyone has his or her own relationship to the source material and to the tools of play (which may indeed be different, e.g. GM tools vs. player tools).
That’s a big deal, isn’t it? Even if, as a non-GM in your game, I have no Authority over back-story, I do have contributory Authority at other levels – and everyone trusts me to value our shared creative activity just as much as, in a traditional group, everyone is supposed to trust the GM.
Meaty, important conflicts, and the timing thereof
Seems to me as if you’re focusing on the timing, but I think that we might do better, at least at the moment, to look at the meat instead.
[Cue: very strong temptation on my part to joke about how “It’s not the meat, it’s the motion” is only partly true, but that reveals what a bad person I am and distracts the puritans among us, and we shall now move on. No one likes my sense of humor except for Vincent.]
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I want to tweak the illusionist, GM-centered plot that the game is built on so that we make it a story about the PCs. Note that the players enjoy the GM plot lines and expect me to drive them forward and resolve them in a satisfying way, but I keep looking for tie-ins to make the story really revolve around the PCs as much as possible. In particular, I'd like to work in some meaty moral conflicts for the PCs but as a supporting feature, not as the end goal of our play. The conflicts are more likely to illuminate a specific feature of a character rather than force a true narrative choice, but we'll see.
Well, what can I say – you’re doing it, just as you’re describing in your posts. I like the conflict-situations you’re tossing up, because essentially you’re using Bangs, a concept I introduced in Sorcerer. Now, I gotta say, what I’m reading now is starting to look like plain ol’ Narrativism, and you said you didn’t want that so much, or at least not yet. How that turns out might depend more on them and less on you, actually. Maybe we ought to hold off on that issue until after you and the group have tried playing with these hard-framing, mind-blowing, character-specific situations (in which players choose or even create the conflicts within them) for a few sessions.
Best, Ron
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